We have the universe in our blood and bones.
And once I’d had my contact with La Presencia, it was as though I was waking from a slumber, leaving a cocoon and flying into a new kind of sentience where I wasn’t just formed of everything but could see and understand it too. And it felt entirely ridiculous and perfectly logical all at once. It was, I suppose, marginally less ridiculous than being born. Coming from nothing into something is probably even more of a miracle, but when everyone has the same miracle, you start to devalue it. It is simple supply and demand.
I finished the last blueberry. I left some money on the table. And then I headed to the car, knowing that if I got to know this island completely, I could understand what I had been brought here for. Because, without question, it had been for a reason. I knew that. And as I got in the car I saw that lobster again, in my mind, and shook it away as I turned the ignition.
I Was Life
I was on a completely new planet.
It was technically the same planet, of course. The same Spanish island here on Earth. But also: it was all new.
Everything seemed infused with sudden wonder or intensity. That moment I’d had in the past only very occasionally – at the sight of a fox or a murmuration of starlings – I was now having about everything. Not just orange juice and watermelons (though fruit, in particular, seemed suddenly sublime in a way I’d never noticed before). But all categories of nature, even human nature.
And at far greater intensity than I had ever had before. Nothing had changed, externally. The world was the same world it had been last year and the year before. And the island was the same one I had been on yesterday.
You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind.
And my mind was absolutely changed.
Everything ached with beauty.
The hard blue sky. The scent of pine. The sound of the cicadas. The heat shimmer where the road met the sky. It was all very real and very magical all at once.
I switched the radio on. There was some of that electronic music again – a lively track I knew with zero prompting was from a Brazilian DJ called Alok, someone I’d obviously never heard of before – but the signal kept cutting out so I retuned to a Spanish pop music station. I returned to a pop music station. They were playing a song I had never heard before but somehow I knew all about it. I knew it was called ‘Despechá’. I knew it was by the Spanish singer Rosalìa and that it had been released in 2022. I supposed this knowledge was simply the knowledge of filling in the gaps. The way you don’t need all the pieces of a jigsaw to guess the picture. But it was now like I could tell the whole thing based on a single piece. I only had to have heard some pop music to know everything about all pop music. I understood the words of this Spanish song. I heard the singer’s determination to dance away her heartbreak and I felt the fun she was having. I liked the way the joy came out of her pain. I got into it right away. I may have even bounced my shoulders a little even though it was a style of music I hadn’t heard before. And after that they played a song by that rapper 21 Savage and I loved it. I turned it up and nodded my head to the beat like I was someone of a different age and life and psychology.
There are patterns everywhere. Something you observed in the past – a conversation on a plane, say – arrives at you in the present, slightly distorted. A singer on a woman’s T-shirt becomes a heard melody. So along came an older song by Taylor Swift called ‘Mirrorball’, and I was every single person who had ever enjoyed that song from every angle. It made me realise I was a mirrorball too, but inverted. The mirrors were directed inward. Instead of the world seeing me from every reflected angle the world was itself the mirrorball and I was the nucleus, and the world was shimmering at me from everywhere, all of it, simultaneously, which sounds terrifying but felt at that moment exhilarating. The track ended and there was some adverts, and adverts – like the news – had the potential to make me mildly nauseous now, so I turned to a classic rock station where they were playing ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ by AC/DC. I had heard it before, because of Karl, and I had asked him to turn it down because it had given me a headache. But now I turned it up. As loud as it could be. And I sang it with the window down and it struck me as both ridiculous and sad that I had never sung in the car before. There was such a simple power to it, and I wished Karl had been there to talk to about it. It was life. AC/DC was life. I was life.
Everything can be beautiful with the right eyes and ears, Maurice. Every genre of music. Every sorrow and every pleasure. Every inhale and exhale. Every guitar solo. Every voice. Every plant beside the tarmac.
I thought of a line from Mary Shelley. From Frankenstein. My second-favourite book, after The Count of Monte Cristo. The line was this: ‘There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.’
I turned the volume back down when I got to the whitewashed church square and saw a couple of rich old hippies, smiling, sun-leathered and wrapped from the waist down in vibrant batik clothes, lounging on wicker chairs outside a café and drinking blue smoothies. As I drove by, I felt their relaxed contentment as if it was my own; it reached my mind like an exhalation. An old man was standing in a doorway looking out at the world with a crinkled, baffled gaze. I saw him playing on that same street as a child, probably in the fifties, pushing a toy tin motorcycle and sidecar along the paving slabs under the watchful eye of a stern member of the Guardia Civil dressed like a soldier. Not a vegan café in sight.
As I drove out of Santa Gertrudis, I switched to a classical music station. Radio Clásica. They were playing Elgar’s first movement from his Cello Concerto in E minor. I’d heard this before too. I often used to listen to classical music at home, but now I was feeling it with every part of me. The sound of the strings was like a rising tide, I was floating, high, groundless, untethered, nothing beneath me, carried by an emotional current without anything to hold on to but the knowledge of being alive.
I came to a small garage where two workmen were trying to squeeze a mattress into the back of a small van that really wasn’t equipped for it. They were laughing and I felt their happiness ripple through me as I drove past.
Cat
There was a wild cat in the road, strutting slowly, its mind surprisingly calm and oblivious to the concept of roads. It was a beautiful, majestic, magnificent creature, and I stopped to let it by.
Lorry
Then my mood changed.
I didn’t know how it happened, but sitting there as I held the steering wheel, waiting for the cat, I was having other memories that weren’t mine. A whole flurry of them all at once.
The powers – ‘talents’ – whatever – were getting stronger. Dizzyingly so. I was feeling Christina. Not in the car but on a beach, tasting her fury as she argued with her husband, and her guilt as her little daughter building a sandcastle began to cry and swiped at the sandcastle, crumbling it to nothing.
Then, much more recently, I was seeing Christina with a woman with glasses and dark, wildly dishevelled hair. They were in this very car. They were talking about the planned hotel on Es Vedrà.
‘Who is behind it?’ the woman asked.
Christina didn’t know. ‘I can’t see them. They are not there.’
‘But you can see everything.’
‘I can’t see this.’
This led somehow to something else. I was seeing her, Christina, talk to a man. I couldn’t see his face. Just as I hadn’t been able to see the face of the man who bribed the Guardia Civil officer. It was the same person, though. I was sure of it.
I was so lost in the memory that it took a moment to realise that there was a lorry behind me, its horn honking like a disgruntled goose.
I drove on. I tried to get Christina out of my mind and focus on the driving, but it was hard. And it wasn’t just Christina. There was knowledge all around me. I wasn’t just passing cars, I was passing thoughts and feelings. Love and hate and indifference. I was submerged in the whole sea of life. I passed Guardia Civil officers searching a car for drugs and the anxious driver hoping they wouldn’t check behind the air vents. I passed a dog and could sense its loneliness. I passed a tree and somehow knew it had 86,427 leaves, just as I knew there were 123,210 hairs on my head, mostly white.
But slowly, the terror I’d been feeling subsided.
Then I passed an open-top Jeep and knew the person driving. I don’t know if this knowledge came from my new talents or simply because I recognised her from the billboards. But it was definitely her. Lieke. Christina’s daughter. She was pulling over at a large garden centre – Eiviss Garden – so I U-turned and pulled over too before I had time to really think about what I was doing.
Lieke
I found her staring at a large selection of potted succulents.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I am sorry to interrupt. But you are Lieke, aren’t you?’
She was tall, taller than her mother, and wearing sunglasses and a long vest, and her bleached hair could be seen beneath a beret the weather didn’t call for. A nose ring, I noticed now. And a neck tattoo of the word ‘Silence’, which seemed a strange word for a DJ to have written on her skin. She had her mother’s eyes, but she had more steel to her. She looked tough, strong. But I also sensed it was a front. She was as fragile as everyone. Her mind, though, told the truth, and emitted bittersweet notes of defiance and sadness.
She nodded. No words.
